For more than 30 years, CedarLane Natural Foods has used fresh, natural ingredients with no preservatives. Restaurant-quality, healthy, easy-to-serve recipes with the homemade taste our loyal customers have come to expect from CedarLane Natural Foods. Whether you are sitting down for dinner, running out the door in the morning, or eating lunch at work between meetings our Cedarlane brand is within reach to assure Your Health. Our Happiness! Cedarlane chefs and nutritionists have you in mind always with delicious, healthy vegetarian entrées to enjoy.
After 30+ years as a celebrated vegetarian brand and friend in the frozen aisle of your retail grocer, we believe that healthful farm-to-fork ingredients and delicious taste are perfectly blended for a superb dining experience. Our pledge: to deliver all-natural, often organic and delicious entrees that are fortified with flavors that burst with goodness and gusto for busy and discerning consumes who enjoy the CedarLane Difference!
Every day, millions of Americans sit down at the table to enjoy delicious meals created and distributed by CedarLane Natural Foods, founded by Robert Atallah with little more than his grandmother’s recipes for Mediterranean-inspired delights. The California company has been growing steadily since its inception in 1982. Fueling its business growth and brand recognition are the health and nutrition needs of consumers.
CedarLane offers product lines of wholesome, all natural foods including fresh hummus and salads, breakfast selections, egg white omelets and frittatas, gluten-free tamales, vegetarian burritos and entrees. Frozen entrees, for example, contain no peanuts or peanut derivatives, and their manufacturing facilities are product-dedicated so there is no potential for cross-contamination.
CedarLane's management recognized that the company's manual business processes were not efficient enough to keep pace with current and expected future growth. Invoices were generated by computers on an old "green screen" system but printed out on paper for routing and filing. It was a long, tedious process to reconcile invoices with deliveries. Retrieving data for reports and audits were especially time consuming, since the data had to be sorted manually from a printout of thousands of invoices.
In the early 2000s, CedarLane launched a search for a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to streamline its business operations.
CedarLane's Baroco had many years of experience with Microsoft Windows-based systems, so he was familiar with both the benefits and the shortcomings. But Linux was fairly new in 2004, and Baroco was open-minded about the advantages of a solution based in open source.
"I wanted to take advantage of a 64 bit system, but Windows didn't run on it," Baroco says.
Just by implementing on clustered Linux servers, Baroco estimates the company saved over $50,000: "This would not have even been an option without xTuple's cross-platform ability, and indeed was not an option with any of the other vendor's proposals."
Baroco's confidence in open source solutions played a big role in CedarLane's decision to go with the xTuple ERP system. The price point was right for the company, as well as the flexibility to own its own source code.
"With xTuple, you get the source code and you can do what you want to do with it at your own timing," Baroco says. "On the other hand, with a large ERP vendor there's no guarantee that they will be around to support the solution in the future."
CedarLane deployed the xTuple ERP system first as a pilot with only five licenses in the summer of 2004. Since that time, the company has added on additional licenses and running with over 30 concurrent users.
CedarLane has used xTuple to streamline operations in accounting, inventory, manufacturing and distribution. Today, the accounting department can quickly retrieve invoices with detailed billing information for each individual item, and it can instantly reconcile invoices and purchase orders. System-generated work orders now drive all manufacturing operations, and inventory is managed with precision, with full traceability to original ingredients by lot number.
"When we added the xTuple inventory control module, we weren't just adding a system, but changing the company culture and creating new procedures," Baroco says. Some of those procedures are a direct reflection of needs specific to food manufacturers. "Traceability is absolutely required in the food industry," Baroco says. "A lot of the ingredients we use can get converted in the finished product and becomes a different lot. You have to trace across those lots. xTuple does that for us very well."
Custom integration to the supply chain
Baroco says that one of the main benefits of the xTuple system is the easy, low-cost path to customized solutions. Since all members of the xTuple community receive the full application source code, they can sponsor (or develop themselves) enhancements that xTuple will review and include in the next official product release.
"We have requirements to do EDI in a certain way, so we requested a customization," Baroco says. "xTuple came back with a very flexible solution, exactly what we wanted."
CedarLane delivers to a large number of supermarkets and generates approximately 5,000 EDI invoices per week. With the xTuple solution, the supermarkets receive the invoice electronically a day before the CedarLane driver arrives. The supermarket only has to confirm proof of delivery according to the items on the invoice.
"With xTuple, there's no question if an invoice has been paid because you can see it right away in the system," Baroco says. "It used to be a very tedious process. Just solving that challenge alone makes xTuple all worth it."
Baroco also got the flexibility of an open source SQL database, without being tied to Windows. "xTuple's PostgreSQL database and its ODBC connector works great for us," Baroco says. "It also works fine with our systems from other vendors who haven't even heard of PostgreSQL, but they're set up to interface with it through ODBC and didn't even notice the difference from Windows."
Well-positioned for continued growth
Looking to the future, CedarLane continues to talk to xTuple about customization to support the maintenance side of operations, such as generating work orders in the system for the company's mechanics.
"Right now, the maintenance work orders are not tied to the part purchase orders in the system and that's something we want to do," Baroco says. "That's not something that is usually a component of ERP, but we're talking about it."
Most importantly today, xTuple delivers robust ERP functionality to ensure that CedarLane can schedule and deliver as promised to its growing list of customers.
"We have too many different ingredients, too many deadlines, so for everything to flow harmoniously we have to have every ingredient here on time so we can fulfill customer orders on time," Baroco says. "CedarLane is at the point that we're just way too big to manage operations without a tool like xTuple."
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